When we noted the beginning of the comment period for the Federal Rules Advisory Committee’s proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing the discovery process with a post last August, the February 15 deadline seemed eons away.

But in mere two weeks, that stretch of the long-and-winding road that is Federal Rules reform will have come and gone. Along the way, WLF has been privileged to testify before the Advisory Committee last November and was the first public interest organization to file public comments with it last October. In order to inform the discussion and explain why the Rules reform effort is so vitally important, WLF published a “Conversations With” paper earlier this month featuring former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, University of Denver’s (and former Colorado Supreme Court Justice) Rebecca Kourlis, and Goldberg Segalla LLP partner John Jablonski.

As just one example of the amounts of data at issue, my own company, GlaxoSmithKline, has preserved 57.6 percent of its company email, amounting to 203 terabytes of information. This would be 20 times the amount of the printed collections of the Library of Congress.